Choices

As we watch the most recent fracas in our most ‘august’ Parliament, watching our ‘distinguished’ legislators battle out the issues that matter to India’s present and future, one is baffled as to how we could have been so remiss in our duties. The country needs structural economic reforms like a fat man needing to go on a diet. The problem is that quite like the fat man, our nation and our people are resistant to making the deep and necessarily painful sacrifices so that our future can be more secure. But then, looking at our peers abroad who perhaps need to make just as painful and urgent decisions to safeguard their fates but who would rather demonize and fight amongst themselves to decide who must sacrifice the most, perhaps we are not alone in our absurdity.

 

 

What are the choices before us? And do we have it in us, as a nation, to recognize the problems that bedevil us and to solve them as a nation? It is convenient to blame our political class for the morass we are in at present, but quagmires aren’t created overnight. Our polity, our attitude to our governing classes, which in turn influences their attitudes towards us, has been to demand the most while giving up the least. “I am a farmer and I produce the grain that you eat and the cotton that you wear. So you must bear the cost of giving me free electric and water supply and exempt me from taxation.” Or “I am a small business owner. Rather than providing me incentives and the facilities to grow my business, I want you to protect me from bigger competitors by erecting barriers to entry and mollycoddling me.” Where is the intellectual debate, the discourse that drives great nations to frenzies of progress? Have we, the nation that bore the great Buddha, the man who advised humanity to give up, for the sake of salvation, the notion of the personal ego, become a nation of egotistic maniacs? Did a nation that, when burdened by the shackles of colonialism, was selfless become selfish the moment the flag of independence was raised? Or were we always this way – concerned solely with our personal ambition and welfare, the rest of the world be damned?

We often and repeatedly repeat for the sake of our foreign peers the cliché that despite the diversity of ethnicity, language, culture, and creed, India has survived as a unified nation for over 65 years now. I say it’s a cliché but really it’s a fallacy. Vast swathes in the heart of our territory are in a state of quasi-civil war between our armed forces and Maoist insurgents. Our North-eastern brethren are dissatisfied with our lack of attention and our cow-belt-centric polity, and have expressed their dissatisfaction with violence on and off ever since they became a part of our Union. Kashmir remains a carbuncle on our arse, one that will neither heal on its own nor let us sit down and relish our general health otherwise. These pressures have always existed, but that we should have let them both fester and become so noxious is our failing as a people. We may say that we elect our leaders to make the difficult decisions for us – alas, when they do make them (once in a blue moon), we are prone to booting them out to Hades. We may say that how does my life in Mumbai/Delhi/Bangalore/Chennai/Kolkata/etc. Impact the Naxalite struggle, but the fact of the matter is that until we recognize that we as a collective have a problem, we have no way of trying to figure out a solution to it as a collective.

We Indians (and while I say that, I recognize that perhaps every country’s natives, but I am concerned solely with India, so that’s that) are prone to taking umbrage to any non-native making disparaging or even critical remarks about our economy, our political system, our social structure, our urban malaise, our infrastructure deficit, etc. We resent them for saying that we aren’t as good as them, for pulling rank on us. To some extent, we have yet to recover from our colonial hangover; we still feel that the world owes us preferential treatment of some kind to recompense for all the horrors and tortures it inflicted on us while we were being colonised. And yet, we clamour for a seat at the high table as an equal, as a nation that will be the superpower of the future. These two attitudes are fundamentally contradictory and the sooner we realize that basic fact, the better it will be for all of us. Sure, we have the right to be offended by criticism, but when it’s constructive criticism, we have no right to be an ostrich with its head in the sand.

We were a great nation; were, because we have a long way to regaining that stature again. We have to comprehend that fundamental change will come not from the barrel of a gun or the throngs of the mob, but from the citadel of the mind. We, the people of this nation, have to work together to identify the problems, understand how best we can solve them, and then get down to solving them. For some of this, we may need to be inside the system, but for some of it, we can very well work alongside the system. The solution to solving corruption or inefficiency in our public lives isn’t to dismantle or uproot the existing system or to create a Russian-doll structure with overlapping bureaucracies and hierarchies regulating the activities of one another. We must understand the fundamental motivations behind such malaises, understand the incentives that will propel people to do the right thing and disincentives which will discourage the wrong sort of behaviours and apply a mixture of both. We cannot expect our government to be an omnipotent enforcer of public morality when we as a society are content to tolerate immorality so long as it benefits us.

We were a nation of reformers, visionaries, educators, and pioneers, who understood that solving problems means sometimes getting into the muck ourselves rather than always petitioning the government to solve them for us. Sure, the government and the opposition parties/coalitions are clueless about what they should be doing and what they should be focusing on – but what are we, the people, for then? The act of voting, of delegating them to the legislatures to be our representatives, is in no way a carte blanche pass for us to abdicate our nation-building responsibilities. If they are clueless, shake them out of their complacency and remind them of what they are supposed to be representing – the will of the people – and not some twisted Machiavellian fantasy of power and influence.

 

 

Political parties vie for our attention in their pretence, in their clamour, to be called our ‘servants’. They call each other enemies of our welfare, while at the same time pursuing the very same policies which they decry. And that we do not call them out on their obvious hypocrisy, that we continue to fall prey to their bait, is surely as much our own failure as much as their perfidy. They will not do what we need them to do, and then conveniently excuse their inaction or even their misguided policies by pointing the finger to our wants and our resistance to change. Like Juvenal would say, “The people who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions, everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.” If they think of us as simpletons who are content with their theatrics, remind them that they have got another thing coming.

 

 

We are a nation that has embraced the notion of capitalism but cannot shake off its adherence to socialism. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem lies when the belief in both ideologies starts interfering with our ability to move along the path of progress. For example, can we have FDI in retail while protecting our small business owners and our farmers from being exploited? Yes, we can, if we are willing to put in the time and effort to create a coherent policy which addresses all concerns, safeguards all stakeholders, and still offers a roadmap to innovation and enterprise. Are we capable of such genius? Any nation that can boast of the IITs, of having created one of the finest planned cities of our age (Chandigarh), a nation that is now creating a digital repository of its populace to streamline welfare and ID provisos, is capable of such and even greater genius. For sure, we have a myriad set of concerns, and while we may want to address all of them in the end, we also have to prioritize, i.e. choose. The twist lies in whether we are willing to do it, and whether we are willing to be content with simplistic notions or whether we will be patient enough to thrash out a robust framework? This in the end is the most basic (at the risk of being simplistic) choice before us. The fork has always been in there in the road – dare we make a decision and choose one path for good?